Rebel Works in Front of Atlanta, Georgia, No. 1

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired by exchange with the Library of Congress

Not on view

On September 1, 1864, the Confederates abandoned Atlanta, and Barnard headed to the evacuated city with his camera to explore its elaborative defenses. Barnard presents nine views of the destruction of Atlanta—half made during the war, half in 1866. Collectively, the series remains among the most celebrated by any nineteenth-century American photographer. This view is one of the most frequently cited and reproduced of all Barnard’s war photographs. The subject is an abandoned Confederate fort with rows of chevaux-de-frise running through the landscape. As he did in one-third of the photographs in Sherman’s Campaign, Barnard used two negatives to produce the print: one for the landscape, one for the sky. The powerful effect seems to have inspired the set designers of many Civil War motion pictures, from Gone with the Wind (1939) to the present.

Exhibition History

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Photography and the American Civil War," April 2, 2013–September 2, 2013.